Chapter 5: Building Leadership Capacity for School-Based Reform in the Arab Region: The TAMAM Model

Over the past 15 years, a team of action researchers has been working with teachers, principals, students, and parents on promoting continuous improvement grounded in those key stakeholders’ deep understanding of their contexts, needs, and aspirations for improving their schools and communities. These researchers’ actions are rooted in the belief that school-level stakeholders can be empowered to lead continuous educational improvement and that the role of researchers is to support them to promote their agency, build their professional capacity, and establish channels for collaborations and partnerships that make their voices heard in the policy-making process. This chapter tells the story of how this team transformed the challenges encountered into learning opportunities to develop an empirically informed design for building the capacity to initiate and lead continuous school-based improvements. The chapter also describes the TAMAM Leadership Capacity Building Program, its components, characteristics, and implementation process.